President Obama says Chicago’s violence ‘equivalent of a Newtown every four months’

President Barack Obama came to Chicago Friday to push for solutions to the city’s epidemic of violence, saying the steady flow of murders here is “the equivalent of a Newtown every four months.”

Pushing again for gun legislation while stressing the violence plaguing the nation “is not just a gun issue,” the president paid homage to 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, the North Kenwood girl who has become a symbol of street violence.

5. Obama says gun violence killing too many children

CHICAGO (AP) — President Barack Obama says that every four months, his hometown of Chicago suffers the loss of as many children as were killed in the Connecticut elementary school shooting.
Obama says gun violence is taking too many children's lives, not just in mass shootings like the one in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 kids. He says 65 children were killed by guns in Chicago last year.
He pushed stricter gun control Friday in a visit to Chicago, ncluding background checks and a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
But he said guns are not solely to blame for the violence. He also pointed to communities with too few fathers involved in children's lives and too few examples of success. He says he wishes he had a father around growing up.

A commission charged with helping the Chicago public school system decide which schools to close recommended on Thursday that no high schools be closed to avoid making students cross gang boundaries to get to a new school.

Parents and school activists have complained that closing neighborhood high schools would endanger students because of gang violence. Chicago recorded 506 murders due to gang violence in 2012, up 17 percent from 2011..

"Closing high schools highly correlates to drop out rates and spikes of violence," Lewis told Reuters. "Hopefully they learned their lesson about that."

The union said 88 percent of students affected by Chicago school closings or other actions in the past decade were African-American and most closed schools were in poor areas.